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This chapter examines firm strengths and weaknesses from the standpoint of intangible assets. These are compared within and across industry sectors in order to better understand who might be a potential collaborator (or competitor) in different contexts. Establishing the conceptual basis of a range of intangibles, including data, explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge, and intelligence, the chapter moves to metrics for assessing industry averages and individual firm capabilities. Finally, several sectors in healthcare are examined, specifically identifying what kinds of collaborators would best fit with a technology-driven start-up like Theranos.

The author examines key factors which affect intangible asset holdings of foreign subsidiaries of multinational enterprises (MNEs). The author developes the hypotheses by drawing upon the pecking order theory in the finance literature and the institution theory. The author theorizes that MNE foreign subsidiaries combine and utilize their cash holdings (finance-based firm-specific advantages [FSAs]) with host country economic freedom (host country-specific advantages [CSAs]) in their holdings of intangible assets which are internally created and/or purchased. The author empirically tests the hypotheses using a new original dataset of European subsidiaries of US MNEs. The author finds that cash holdings and host country economic freedom share a significant and positive relationship with intangible asset holdings. The author discusses the implications of the findings for theory and practice.

The provision of value, as a marketing issue, is receiving increasing attention from managers and scholars. This attention, in combination with strong calls for better quantification and stronger measures in marketing, has lead to increased interest in the assessment, quantified where possible, of the provision of value through buyer–seller relationships. This paper identifies dimensions of value provision through relationships in business markets with specific emphasis on the intangible aspects of value, which are important to long-term competitive advantage. The provision of value to the seller is the prime focus in this paper. The paper discusses the meaning of both tangible and intangible relationship value and the interplay between them and notes the importance of assessing the intangible part of the value, particularly the part which derives from the human aspects of the relationship. Despite their importance, the human aspects of relationships and their contribution to value is a sparse topic among researchers. The paper compares and evaluates potentially useful relationship and value conceptualizations. The paper discusses studies of relationship value and then outlines the results of a recent line of empirical research into the provision of value by a buyer to a seller that utilizes a framework synthesized from the intellectual capital literature. This recent research conceptualizes the potential for a seller's relationship with a buyer to provide intangible value to the seller in terms of, first, the resources available in the buyer and second, the capabilities of the buyer's boundary personnel to aid in facilitating the flow of those resources to the seller. The paper also includes the softer human aspects in the dimensions of value. These latter aspects are important to a full assessment of value. The paper concludes with a discussion of aspects of intangible relationship value that need further elucidation and will thus provide opportunities for future research.

In this paper, we investigate the information content of non-current assets (NCA) among firms listed on the main board of Bursa Malaysia. Specifically, we investigate the information content of tangible and intangible NCA during the economic crisis period of 1997–1998. Our empirical analysis uses time-varying and fixed effects models for the period 1995–1999. We measure information content based on the association of analysts’ earnings forecasts errors (AFE) with both capitalized tangible and intangible NCA. We find evidence of higher information content in tangible NCA compared to intangible NCA during the Asian economic crisis period of 1997–1998. Our evidence is consistent with the assumption that tangible assets are more reliable compared to intangible assets for prediction of expected cash flows during economic crisis periods.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the reporting practices on intangible assets from the perspective of a post-transition economy. The chapter explores the significance of intangibles and the content of the disclosures provided by companies in annual reports.

The analysis is qualitative in nature. Annual reports of selected Slovene publicly traded companies are analysed. The research is based on the analysis of required disclosures by International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and an analysis of voluntary disclosures provided by companies for the 2007–2011 financial years.

The results indicate that intangibles are less significant in comparison with publicly traded companies from traditionally developed economies. The analysis of disclosures reveals that companies provide almost exclusively the disclosures required by IFRS, while voluntary disclosures are not provided. Furthermore, results indicate deficiencies in financial reporting practices related to required disclosures.

The analysis is conducted on a small sample of companies. This is a consequence of the fact that a limited number of companies is trading on Ljubljana Stock Exchange. In the primary and standard quotation of shares, only 25 companies are present.

Since a growing stream of research emphasises the importance of intangibles for companies’ performance, the findings indicate possibilities for improvement of financial reporting.

The research findings contribute to existing research in the field of accounting for intangibles from the perspective of a post-transition economy. More studies of this kind in transition and post-transition economies using IFRS have yet to be performed.

This study compares U.S. firm international strategies between two starkly different industries. We find that firms are more inclined to adopt global strategies in the integrated global industry than in the multidomestic industry. The global strategy does not seem to be effective unless a firm possesses substantial intangible assets. R&D-based intangible assets play a more significant role than marketing-based intangible assets in both the integrated global industry and (to a lesser extent) the multidomestic industry. Additionally, internationalization pace has a positive direct impact, and a negative interaction effect with the global strategy on firm performance in the integrated global industry.

Intellectual capital is the set of all intangible assets, that is, invisible, non-monetary assets held by a library, which can be identified as separate assets. Intellectual capital has become the buzzword of a knowledge-based economy and is the ultimate source of competitive advantage. In this work, we review the literature to analyse the effect of intellectual capital utilisation in the overall library management, to identify and classify intellectual capital and to provide some guidelines for researchers and practitioners. A literature review for the intellectual capital in libraries is conducted, and a qualitative analysis is undertaken, which interrelates library management to intellectual capital is taking place. The review leads to identification and classification of intellectual capital as well as to a number of quite innovative and interesting issues for the interrelation of intellectual capital to the management of libraries. The issues studied include intellectual capital economic valuation methods, the effect of the locality (spatial factor) to intellectual capital utilisation and the analysis of co-opetition (cooperation and competition) for intellectual capital utilisation. This is one of only a few studies about the management of intellectual capital in libraries and information services (LIS)—an innovative and challenging area of research in library management.

Marketers frequently lament the lack of representation of marketing in the boardroom and the short tenure of CMOs. The most common explanations offered are that marketing is not perceived as a strategic discipline and that marketers do not demonstrate a strong enough understanding of how the business makes money.

Financial accounting is how “score is kept” in terms of business performance. It is, therefore, in the self-interest of marketers to become familiar with financial reporting. Doing so will allow them to understand how marketing activities are recorded. In addition, academic researchers need to understand the meaning of the financial measures that they often use as the metrics of success when researching marketing strategy questions.

This is especially important since financial reporting generally does not recognize assets created by marketing investments. In order to substantiate a claim that “brands are assets”, marketers must be able to explain how the financial accounting rules misrepresent economic reality and why managers might use a different set of principles for management reporting.

We argue that the misrepresentation of market-based assets has two forms of negative impact for marketers: external and internal. The external problems are that financial statements are not especially informative about the value of marketing for the providers of capital and do not provide a true portrait of the economic resource base of the company. The internal problems are that marketers cannot point to valuable assets that they are creating, nor can they be effectively held accountable for the way that these assets are managed given that the assets are not recorded.

We do not expect immediate radical changes in financial reporting because financial accounting rules are designed with the specific interests of the suppliers of capital (debt and equity) in mind. To influence financial accounting developments, such as encouraging greater disclosure of marketing activity in the notes to the published accounts, marketers must be able to communicate in language understood by accountants and the current users of financial accounts. To aid this we provide guidance for marketers on the purpose and practices of accounting. We also discuss how academic marketing researchers might wish to adjust financial accounting data to capitalize a proportion of marketing expenses for companies where marketing is a primary driver of business performance.

In 2009 and 2010, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) adopted new accounting standards for nonprofit mergers and acquisitions. The new accounting standards are an example of the constitutive role accounting can play in how people think about economic events, since the FASB defined a new concept (the “inherent contribution”) and required valuation of intangible assets that were often previously unrecognized.

The FASB’s stated goals included minimizing “pooling” accounting and maximizing transparency regarding fair value information, acquired identifiable intangible assets, and the relation between consideration paid and the fair values of identifiable assets acquired. The FASB expected many combinations would involve little or no consideration. It also expressed concern that some organizations would undervalue assets acquired, especially intangible assets.

For a sample of 2012–2017 nonprofit hospital combinations, we find general agreement with the FASB’s expectations. Almost all combinations were accounted for as acquisitions, not mergers, even though there was frequently no consideration paid. More acquirers recorded “inherent contributions” than goodwill, because the net fair value of the acquired hospital’s identifiable assets exceeded the consideration paid. Acquirers ascribed value to assets, such as intangible assets, that would have gone unreported under the prior accounting rules, although lower levels of intangible assets were recognized in nonprofit business combinations, relative to total non-goodwill assets acquired, than in public companies’ acquisitions.

Intellectual capital (IC) and social capital (SC), as forms of intangible value in organizations, are crucial assets in today's volatile business environment. Efforts to retain and develop these intangibles are becoming more deliberate and disciplined. However, organizations fail to recognize the relationship between organizational distress and the loss and/or reduction of intangible value. The loss of intangible value may potentially impact an organization with equal or greater damage than the loss of more tangible value. IC and SC generate many outcomes beneficial to the individual and the organization. These benefits are reduced when stress of employees becomes excessive and damaging. The relationship between the health of an organization and the degree of impact of distress serves as a lingering threat to organizational financial resources. Managers must build upon the growing knowledge from research and practice to help organizations account for the costs of organizational distress, translate the importance of intangible value into tangible terms, and garner support for developing IC and SC to obtain business objectives. Deliberate and disciplined effort to build collaborative capital can facilitate the growth of IC and SC which minimize the damage of organizational distress.